Unusual Christian Places: The Statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin in Macau

This statue in Macau is of the Buddhist “Mercy Goddess,” Guanyin.   Not actually a goddess, she is a bodhisattva, one who has attained enlightenment but has vowed to seek the enlightenment of all sentient beings.  Many also associate this bodhisattva with the Virgin Mary. ???  The answer lies in the history of Macau and the resultant mixing of cultures and religions.

Jorge Alvares landed in China in 1513, and by 1535 trade between Portugal and China was established.   The site of Macau eventually became a Portuguese colony, administered to various degrees by Portugal from 1557 to 1999, when the rental agreement with China expired.  During this period, Roman Catholicism became a strong presence in the area, which also includes followers of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and smaller native faiths.

http://www.placesandfoods.com/2013/05/guan-yin-statue-of-macau.html

http://www.tripomatic.com/China/Macau-Special-Administrative-Region/Macau/Guan-Yin-Statue/

http://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/art-architecture/kuan-yin-of-macau-city.html

Guanyin (short for Guanshiyin, “Observing the Cries of the World”) is an immortal bodhisattva, She is rarely represented as male.  She has vowed to never rest until she has freed all sentient beings from the cycle of reincarnation.  Because of her infinite compassion, she is sometimes depicted as holding a child.

There are several streams of Buddhism, some being very strict, austere, and individually oriented.  The less strict version, Mahayana (”Greater Vehicle”) encourages everyone to become a bodhisattva (“enlightenment being”) and to work for the eventual enlightenment of every sentient being in the universe by the idea of “merit transference.”  The idea is that “merit” earned by the enlightened bodhisattva can be transferred to less advanced beings to aid in their advancement.  This Mahayana Buddhist doctrine may possibly have developed in response to  contact with Christianity.

During the Edo (Tokugawa Shogunate) Period (1603-1867) in Japan, Christianity was totally banned and was declared to be punishable by death. Christians were forced to go “underground.”  Many venerated Jesus and the Virgin Mary by disguising them as statues of Kannon (another name for Guanyin) holding a child.  Statues such as this are known as Maria Kannon.  There was often a cross hidden in an inconspicuous location on the statue. Note the similarities of the face in the image in the following link with the face of Guanyin on the statue in Macau.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/audio-east-meets-west-virgin-and-child-ivory-carving/

An image of a Maria Kannon from Wikipedia used under the GNU Free Documentation License.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maria_Kannon.jpg

More on Edgar Cayce

Yesterday, I posted about Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet.  Search your Bible and test some of the other teachings of Edgar Cayce.

1. The Christ entity came to Earth in many different time periods in order "to manifest the first idea."  At various times it manifested in the following men: Adam, Enoch, Melchizedek, Joseph, JKoshua, Jeshua, and Jesus.

2. Christians serve "the Master Jesus who became the Christ." The Christ entity is a created being and is not a man; Jesus was the man.

3. Enlightenment comes when we realize our own divine nature and become at one with God.  This is classical pantheism.

4. Each of us is the same as Jesus, a spirit child of God. We each may have the Christ consciousness, the Holy Spirit.  The Creator Consciousness desired to have companions and so it created entities like itself from within itself, the first being Christ.  This means that every soul is a portion of God and therefore is divine and existed before this life.

5. Jesus was an Essene.  His mother Mary was one of twelve young girls chosen by the Essenes to be trained to become the mother of the Messiah.  Jesus and Mary were twin souls. Both were trained in the teachings of India, Egypt, and Persia and studied astrology, numerology, phrenology and reincarnation under the tutelage of the leader of the Essenes, Judy, "the first of women."  Judy's parents were Essenes at Carmel.

(Poster's comment; This teaching is totally absurd. The Essenes were a Jewish ascetic sect which strove for absolute ritual cleanliness and purity. They took ritual baths each day and avoided women to the point of not even allowing female animals in their communities.)

6. Cayce life readings dealt with telepathy, past lives, auras, telepathy, out-of-body experiences, and communicating with the dead.

7.  The power in gemstones can be harnessed.  The ancient city of Atlantis was powered by a giant crystal ball.

8.  Cayce predicted that in 1958 the United States would discover a death ray which was used on the ancient city of Atlantis.

9. Soul entities on Earth had sex with animals to produce giants.

10. The five human races were created separately but simultaneously on the Earth.

11. Many modern people were associates of Jesus in prior lives.

12. We are usually associated with people we knew in past lives.

13. Reincarnation gives a soul entity time to correct and perfect itself in its way back to oneness with God.

Book Comment: Edgar Cayce on Jesus and His Church

Edgar Cayce, a photographer by trade, and born in 1877 in Kentucky (USA), is known as the Sleeping Prophet.  He is represented today by the Association for Research and Enlightenment. 

In a trance state, Cayce gave thousands of “life readings” (over 14,000 documents) for individuals over a forty-three year career.  He claimed to be a Christian, read the entire Bible annually, and served as a Campbellite (Christian Church, Disciples of Christ) Sunday School teacher.  Those who knew him personally said that he was a gentle, kind, and humble man. Then, why is he considered to have been a heretic by the vast majority of Christendom?  Reading Edgar Cayce on Jesus and His Church (1970) will give you a good idea.

 

The book, by devotee Anne Read, is supposed to give us a “much truer and more complete understanding of the life of Jesus than the Bible alone.”  To the spiritually and intellectually awake Christian, this statement is a giant flashing red flag.

The vast majority of the Cayce “life readings” concern health, massage therapy,  and the treatment of disease states.  Cayce, though possessing only a seventh-grade education, is considered by many to have been one of the fathers of modern holistic medicine.

In other readings, starting around 1922, Cayce began to stray significantly from orthodox Christian doctrine.  His trance declarations began to include references to past lives, reincarnation, astrology, Atlantis, Akashic records, the Universal Mind, spiritual beings, prophecies of the future, and unorthodox declarations about the nature of God and Jesus.       

At first, Cayce himself was concerned about the turn his readings had taken, but soon, he became convinced he was imparting the truth to his followers.  Edgar Cayce said that he never actually heard his own readings because he was asleep when he gave them.  He read transcripts of the readings when he woke up.  His initial misgivings about the contents of the readings is obvious from what he said to Arthur Lammers when he awoke from one trance state and read what he had said.  

“But what you’ve been telling me today, and what the readings have been saying, is foreign to all I’ve believed and been taught, and all I’ve taught others, all of my life.  It ever the Devil was going to play a trick on me, this would be it.” Quoted in Thomas Sugrue, Stranger in the Earth, 1971, p. 210.

The worst deviation from Christianity in the Cayce teachings concerns who Jesus was.  This is the main point of Cayce’s heresy.  He taught that Jesus was a man, a created soul, a spirit child of God, who became the Christ.  He further taught that we are also the spirit children of God, the same as Jesus, and that salvation and enlightenment comes when we realize our true nature and return to God.  This is the New Age doctrine of the divinity of man mixed in with the ancient heresies of Adoptionism and Arianism.  Both heresies deny the full deity of Jesus.

One Christian response to Cayce is stated by William J. Petersen in his book, Those Curious New Cults, p. 46.

“For a good portion of his life, Cayce was a commercial photographer.  He understood very well the mechanics of his trade.  A blank film is inserted, the shutter is snapped,  and then the film is developed in the dark.  The nature of a photograph, whether it is a formal family picture or pornography, depends not on the film but on the photographer who uses the cameras.  During his trances, Cayce’s mind was like a blank film that would be developed in the dark.  I believe that Cayce allowed his camera to get into the wrong hands.”

Petersen is hinting at what many people believe: the person who was speaking during Cayce’s trance states was not Edgar Cayce, but someone else, something else.  Speaking in traces is a standard event for mediumship and spiritism/spiritualism.  The New Age teachings of Ascended Masters and spirit guides speaking through human channellers comes immediately to mind.  The messages given by these spirit guides invariably are at odds with orthodox Christianity.

 What I am about to say will sound very controversial to some Christians, especially those who have accepted the anti-supernaturalism of the modernist world view (there it is again).  Unless one accepts that the spirit guides are who they say they are, they must be someone else.  The obvious answer is that they are Satan himself, or more likely his demons.

The Bible is quite emphatic that Satan and his demons exist.  In fact, Jesus said so.  Either Jesus was ignorant, mistaken, or correct.  I would go with Jesus.

A detailed Christian Response

http://www.watchman.org/profiles/edgar-cayce/

More on Edgar Cayce tomorrow.

Film Comment: Over and Over Again, With Variations

     Hinduism and Buddhism are the major religions which believe in reincarnation, the belief that one returns to a new human (usually human) life after death.  In the new life, one advances or regresses in their spiritual evolution based on their actions in their prior life.  Eventually everyone becomes so spiritually advanced that they return to their true self, God, and are not reborn on Earth.  In essence, everyone gets a second, third, ... three-thousandth, ... four millionth chance to get it right.

     Numerous films and television episodes have grabbed onto this idea over the years. Here are a few:

1961: "Shadow Play," The Twillight Zone (television series).  A man is found guilty of murder and sentenced to the electric chair.  He insists to everyone around him that it's all a nightmare; that he'll be back in court after his execution, with all the same people present but playing different roles.

1992: "Cause and Effect," Star Trek: The Next Generation (television series). The Enterprise becomes caught in a repeating time loop which always results in the destruction of the ship.  Luckily, one of the crew is an android who can think outside the loop.  He realizes what is going on and takes steps to stop it.

1993: Groundhog Day.  This funny Bill Murray film has a totally bored weatherman reliving the same day over and over, with him making slight changes in his actions each day in an effort to finally get things right and escape the loop.

1993: 12:01.  At one minute after noon, a man repeatedly tries to prevent the murder of a woman.

1998: Dark City. A man with no memories realizes that the same night is being repeated over and over again with changes each time.

1998: Run, Lola, Run.  This is a love it or hate it film; a mixture of cartoon and live action footage.  Lola has twenty minutes to come up with 100,000 deutsche marks to give to her boyfriend so he won't be forced to rob a supermarket, so ... she runs, and runs, and runs.  Several different possible outcomes are presented by the film. 

2004: The Butterfly Effect. A man finds that he can return to earlier events in his life.  Each time he tries to make changes in events, unexpected twists make things worse than before.

2006: The Deaths of Ian Stone. Ian is brutally murdered each day, only to wake up in a new life and be murdered again.  He meets the same people, always in different roles, in each life.  This continues until one day one of the recurring people lets him in on the secret.

2006: The Butterfly Effect 2.  Largely a rehash of the earlier film.

     This idea of repetition of events until one "gets it right" makes for good stories, but is not compatible with a Christian understanding of reality.  It is clear that the Bible teaches that we have this one life and are responsible for what we do with this one life.  

"And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:" Hebrews 9:27